Early this morning, shortly after midnight, Republican Kevin McCarthy of California won enough votes to become speaker of the House of Representatives. Not since 1860, when it took 44 ballots to elect New Jersey’s William Pennington as a compromise candidate, has it taken 15 ballots to elect a speaker. — Notes: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/07/politics/kevin-mccarthy-path-to-speakership/index.html  McCarthy: But I do want to thank especially President Trump. I don’t think anybody should doubt his influence.  Called it.
“On Tucker Carlson, Rep Massie announces McCarthy agreed to create a committee, à la Frank Church Committee, to investigate ‘influence of FBI and various intel agencies on domestic politics.’”
https://t.co/XskjeXcCck https://t.co/wSlpEZjfpd  Deadline White House @DeadlineWH https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/07/mccarthy-speaker-election-lessons/  The real hero from this last week is this woman: Cheryl Johnson, the second Black person to ever be the Clerk of the House. She oversaw the entire Republican circus with nothing but dignity, composure, and grace. America thanks you, Cheryl Johnson. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-mccarthy-house-speaker-multiple-ballots-history/  McCarthy going out of his way to gush over Trump at a time when his influence is clearly diminished & political brand is more toxic to mainstream voters than ever - especially on the anniversary of the insurrection - is notable & indicative of who he'll be beholden to as speaker  Acyn @Acyn https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/south-carolina-gerrymandering.html https://www.axios.com/2023/01/07/kevin-mccarthy-speech-new-seaker-trump-and-biden https://speakai.co/republican-kevin-mccarthys-house-speaker-acceptance-speech/ |
Sunday, January 8, 2023
January 7, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
FOCUS: Kathryn Winner | Allen Ginsberg's Self-Recording Sessions
08 January 23
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In the late sixties, Ginsberg began taping many of his public appearances, as well as his casual and private conversations. He used the recordings to compose his greatest work.
In the second dream, Esquire wanted to interview Ginsberg “for a feature article on [his] divine person.” Ginsberg called his friend William S. Burroughs to share the news, but Burroughs disapproved, telling Ginsberg he’d been vain and stupid to accept the invitation. Ginsberg felt “chagrined,” and woke up. Next, he was headed toward San Francisco in the Volkswagen. A poem earnestly titled “Beginning of a Poem of These States” tracks his journey. Ginsberg records the character and color of the landscape, the tinny pandemonium on the radio, the Beach Boys singing tenderly against a backdrop of new industrial farmlands spreading; he suggests that his tennis shoes from Central Europe are not thick enough to keep his feet from getting cold in the early mornings.
What else do you want to know? Ginsberg’s life has been exhaustively catalogued by multiple encyclopedic biographies. But his experience of the late sixties is knowable in especially fine detail—a consequence of his efforts in those years to make the work of writing and self-documentation as mobile, flexible, and constant as possible. His poetry began to resemble a travel log, attaching particular experiences to particular places. In “Beginning of a Poem of These States,” he describes the morning sun warming his feet, ravens landing on a dead cow at the side of the road, tomato sandwiches, silence. Through California’s Donner Pass, the poem’s speaker feels a surge of giddy freedom; “I have nothing to do,” he says, “laughing.” Wildfire smoke forms a purple band at the horizon, and the speaker chants to the Hindu god Shiva—a “new mantra to manifest Removal of Disaster from my self.” As an unnaturally red sun sets over California, Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” comes on the radio. “Dylan ends his song / ‘You’d see what a drag you are,’ ” wrote Ginsberg. The actual line is “You’d know what a drag it is to see you.” Eventually, as the story goes, Ginsberg would obtain a tape recorder with help from Dylan.
“Beginning of a Poem of These States,” which appears in the first pages of “The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971,” demonstrates Ginsber’s growing enthusiasm for highly detailed modes of self-recording. “The Fall of America” is Ginsberg’s fifth collection of poems (after “HOWL,” “Kaddish,” “Reality Sandwiches,” and “Planet News”) and his longest and most critically successful standalone work. The original edition, published by City Lights in 1972, is a cult object, a chunky little book with a minimalist black and white cover, title and author intoned in a cool, lightly-serifed font. As the title suggests, its poems convey images of national decline and collapse, which Ginsberg attributes to an interlocking set of causes: racial exploitation and violence; the outsized power of certain depraved politicians and corporate owners; widespread, reality-warping abuses of mass media; and compounding environmental devastations—in short, an evergreen guide to the end of the empire. But virtuosic topicality and overdetermined relevance to our own moment aren’t what make “The Fall of America” special. To understand its prescience, and experience its enduring appeal, you have to zoom in on its process.
“The Fall of America” was famously written with the help of a portable tape machine. When Ginsberg began work on it in 1965, amateur recording was a relatively new possibility: magnetic tape technology had just made its way into the U.S. at the end of the Second World War, when reel-to-reel recorders were machines the size of mini-fridges, generally acquired by record labels or entertainment and news outlets. Rapid advancements ensued, and by the nineteen-sixties there were smaller, battery-powered tape machines available to consumers. Ginsberg used an Uher, an upscale German model that was distributed in the United States by Martel. The Uher was easy to carry (weighing only several pounds), plus its special features included a rechargeable battery that could be plugged into any outlet and a microphone that doubled as an electromagnetic remote control, making it possible to start and stop the recorder from a distance.
“The Fall of America” compresses the hours Ginsberg spent playing with his new toy. When he was composing what he called “auto poesy,” Ginsberg would switch on the machine and spout lines into the air of the Volkswagen. He recorded his reactions to billboards, pop songs, ads, and news reports; confessed intimate feelings; and addressed an eclectic list of higher powers (Hindu saints, yogis, Herman Melville, and Bob Dylan). He would replay the recordings again and again, listening carefully—repeating and re-recording certain lines, refining and building on his rhythms. Then he’d transcribe the tapes’ contents into his journal, editing, formatting, and polishing as he went. His journals suggest that he planned to clear his schedule of commitments, drive back and forth across the continental U.S., and spontaneously record his thoughts about life, friendship, waning youth, and the search for authenticity. Ginsberg himself seems to have acknowledged the conceit as derivative—an aping of “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s best-selling novel of the late nineteen-fifties.
“Pray for me, Jackie,” Ginsberg appears to have told his brand-new tape recorder around 1965, addressing it like a telephone receiver in a burst of coy neediness. “All I can do is think like you, write like you.” The comparison flatters Kerouac, who spent the late nineteen-sixties living semi-reclusively and struggling with alcoholism in Florida. But it fairly reflects Ginsberg’s passion for mimesis, and for talking to people who may or may not be listening.
Like Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose,” auto poesy was a more labor- and time-intensive process than the coinage suggests. Ginsberg began taping many of his public appearances, as well as his casual and private conversations. He carried the Uher with him everywhere—into auditoriums, classrooms, restaurants, train stations. He taped himself on planes and at parties. His use accelerated so quickly that it caused fights with his boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky. By 1966, recordings suggest that Peter felt abandoned for the little machine and the hyper-absorbed moods it could induce. “Work your fucking recorder, man,” Peter once told Ginsberg in the middle of a heated argument. Ginsberg tried to mollify him—“I like you, Peter, everything’s all right.”—Peter snubbed him. “You like your publicity,” Peter said, suggesting that the recorder appealed as a surrogate audience. “You keep it.” (This tape now sits in Ginsberg’s enormous tape archive at Stanford University; the tape is labelled “Peter angry in car,” in Ginsberg’s handwriting). Ginsberg would eventually avail himself of Peter’s insult: the long poem “Iron Horse” opens with a detailed transcription of the poet literally getting off to the sound of his own voice; he dirty-talks the microphone while masturbating, fully nude, in a train car.
Ginsberg once wrote in his journal that “the best antipolice state strategy was total exposure of all secrets.” “Unclassify everybody’s private life,” he suggested. “President Johnson’s as well as mine.” The years spanned by “The Fall of America” roughly coincide with the time that the F.B.I. was compiling a dossier on Ginsberg, focussing primarily on his sexuality, drug use, and psychiatric history. We could see Ginsberg’s obsession with self-recording as strategic, an effort to counteract repressive invasions of privacy by preëmptively surrendering everything to the eyes and ears of everyone.
But Ginsberg also appeared to be motivated by a prodigious appetite for fame and recognition. Bill Morgan’s biography, “I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg,” opens with two juxtaposed anecdotes: in the first, Ginsberg interrupts a violent dispute on a sidewalk in New York City by approaching the person at the center of it, a woman evidently out of her mind on bad drugs, and offering her a Fig Newton, a kindness so incongruous it seemingly diffused the situation. The second takes place at the end of Ginsberg’s life. The last letter he ever wrote, according to Morgan, was addressed to President Clinton: “I have untreatable liver cancer and have 2-5 months to live,” it read. “If you have some sort of award or medal for service in art or poetry, please send one along.” These two impulses—the reparative and the approval-seeking—converge in Ginsberg’s experiments with recording. The lyric persona of the tape poems strives to be as worthy of our attention as he is desperate for it.
The most famous and highly regarded poem Ginsberg ever composed on tape is “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” completed in 1966. It wasn’t included in “The Fall of America”; Ginsberg released it early, apparently out of enthusiasm (it appeared in 1968’s “Planet News”). A symbolic struggle between the individual poet and the U.S. state forms the core of its dramatic action: Ginsberg—who identifies himself in the poem as “a lonesome man in Kansas . . . not afraid to speak my lonesomeness in a car”—declares the ongoing war in Vietnam “over now,” even as body counts come in over the radio. The euphoric climax:
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days’ Illusion!—
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its own delight
let the President execute his own desire—
this Act done by my own voice
nameless Mystery—
published to my own senses,
blissfully received by my own form
approved with pleasure by my sensations
manifestation of my very thought
accomplished in my own imagination
all realms within my consciousness fulfilled
60 miles from Wichita.
Ginsberg’s autonomously “published” voice commands a momentous authority—the suggestion being that his Uher is an instrument of radical democratization, channelling world-making power away from corrupted institutions and toward ordinary people. But this rosy view of technology is undercut by the poem’s conclusion: a racially obscene volta addressed explicitly to white people implies that the poet’s “Act” has excluded Black Americans, for whom nothing has changed.
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” brought Ginsberg’s investment in questions of politics, propaganda, and governance to the surface of his writing. “The Fall of America” was no longer a poetry version of “On the Road.” Ginsberg had a new, if still imperfect, point of comparison: “The Cantos,” Ezra Pound’s unfinished and infamously complicated modernist poem. Politically, Ginsberg and Pound’s differences were profound: Ginsberg was a left-wing activist leader, Pound a noted antisemite and Fascist collaborator. Ginsberg had nevertheless dreamed of meeting Pound for a long time—in one dream, Pound turned out to be “a short Jewish fellow” who was interested in the same things Ginsberg was. Ginsberg met Pound in the fall of 1967 in Italy, where Pound had been living a comfortable, increasingly catatonic existence since his 1958 release from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. (he was committed in 1946, after being indicted in absentia for treason for making Italian broadcasts which apparently expressed Fascist views).
If Ginsberg was at all nervous about visiting Pound, the entries in his journal suggest he didn’t show it. (These entries are extremely detailed; it seems possible that Ginsberg could have recorded some parts of his conversations with Pound.) “How old are you, old man?” Ginsberg reports asking when they met in Venice. (He also notes that he was “several wines and a stick of pot” deep.) Pound, it emerged, was turning eighty-two in a few days. They spoke several times during Ginsberg’s stay in Italy, most often at Pound’s home. Their conversation meandered (Ginsberg had a free-associative style of communicating), but it kept returning to Pound’s depression and self-loathing, his miserable inability to write. Pound complained that “The Cantos” were structurally “a mess” and Ginsberg offered his earnest reassurances: “I said the Cantos were solid.” At one point Ginsberg asked him “if he was at all familiar with my poetry.” Pound shook his head no. “I said, Well, oddly, it might even please you.”
Ginsberg was invited to spend Pound’s birthday with him. The night of, at 10 P.M., Ginsberg knocked on the door of Pound’s villa, wearing a gold silk shirt and carrying a harmonium and some of his own work—manuscript pages, it appears, from “The Fall of America.” After fireside cake and champagne, Ginsberg took a chance, reading “a few pages of ‘Middle Section of Long Poem on These States’ ” to “illustrate [the] effect of his composition on mine.”
The reading appears to have gone poorly. “Oops!,” Ginsberg wrote in his journal. “Silence. Eek! Put that down fast.” He recovered by picking up his harmonium and chanting “50 verses” of a Hindu prayer to Gopala. Before leaving, he made a small demand. “Say Goodnight!” Ginsberg said, waving from the entryway. “He nodded amiably, said ‘Goodnight.’ So I left.”
It’s unclear what effect this ambivalent encounter had on Ginsberg. The political and personal upheavals of the following year (the Tet offensive began in January, 1968; his friend Neal Cassady died that February) must have forced him to move on quickly. The latter half of “The Fall of America” reflects the chaotic, uneven quality of Ginsberg’s life in those years. But it’s possible to see, in the velocity of Ginsberg’s language, a repudiation of Pound’s terminal obsession with structure, his silent retreat into feelings of artistic failure. To paraphrase the literary critic Hugh Kenner, “The Cantos” seemed paradoxically ancient to readers of Pound’s era, despite being vehemently topical. Their extreme difficulty, combined with an initially limited availability in print, led readers to construe Pound’s mind as the unapproachable source of an orphic craft. “The Fall of America” can be described in precisely opposite terms. If the reader can’t approach Ginsberg, it is because he has approached the reader first, and is currently pointing at the sky like a preacher and reading insistent lines at her:
“stay silent, ugly teachers,
let me & the Radio yell about Vietnam and mustard gas.”
Or, in a tone of itchy despair:
“I called in Exterminator Who soaked the Wall floor with
bed-bug death oil. Who’ll soak my brain with death oil?”
Or, venting stiff outrage at a journalist,
“Hanson Baldwin is a Military Ass-Kisser.”
Or maybe he’d go with something lovely, like an image of himself in landscape, rendered in warm, globular phrases:
“St. John’s Wort nodding yellow bells at the sun! eyes
close in your presence, I
lie in your soft green bed, watch light thru red lid-skin,
language persistent as birdwarble in my brain.”
However indebted Ginsberg may have felt to Poundian composition, his opus is defined by the way it makes his mind available, moment by moment, to our knowledge, attention, observation, and scrutiny. To read “The Fall of America” is to follow its author as he continuously converts individual experience into a stream of bright, informationally dense mosaics—a perusable abundance of compelling images, catchy sounds, and sensitive reactions to looming existential threats. Where Ginsberg went and with whom; how he dressed and what he ate; the headlines and articles he read and reacted to; the protests he attended; the hotel rooms he passed through; the meditations he practiced; the drugs he took; the sights, sounds, and smells he enjoyed or endured: all of this is discoverable. Ginsberg’s auto poesy gives us his life not merely as a collection of facts, but as an imminent reality—there for you to judge, worship, reject, envy, study, or imitate as you will.
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FOCUS: Wajahat Ali | McCarthy Learned What Happens When You Dance With Arsonists
08 January 23
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The Republican House leader never thought the “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” would actually eat his face.
The GOP and its House leader Kevin McCarthy are currently learning this painful lesson through public humiliation and masochism. After ten rounds of voting, up to 21 extremist members of an increasingly radicalized and violent GOP have decided to flex their power by blocking the nomination of Rep. McCarthy as House Speaker, and preventing the 118th Congress from being sworn in.
Despite granting numerous concessions that debase his own power, McCarthy has been unable to win over these MAGA firebrands, most of whom belong to the House Freedom Caucus. Even though 17 of them were endorsed by Trump, the golden MAGA king’s steadfast support of McCarthy hasn’t been enough to sway these rebels without a cause. This includes gun enthusiast Rep. Lauren Boebert who publicly rebuked Trump’s call to back McCarthy. Even Sean Hannity, the tireless GOP propagandist and Trump’s consigliere, couldn’t sway Boebert during a testy exchange on his Fox News show this week.
It is evident that these Republican flamethrowers are committed to their extremism—even if it ends in self-immolation for their own party. The cruelty, and the chaos, are the point.
With the voting process moving to Round 11 and beyond, these Republican intransigents have been labeled “terrorists” for holding up Congress. That comment didn’t come from Democrats, who have remained unified and are enjoying the GOP clown show, but was instead unleashed by Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX)—a Trump-supporting dyed-in-the-wool right-winger—who echoes many of his colleagues’ frustration.
These Freedom Caucus Republicans are so committed to the chaos that they’ve briefly made Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who fears Jewish Space Lasers, look like a pragmatic politician. Greene, who is backing McCarthy after brokering a deal for more power, accused the GOP defectors of playing “Russian roulette” with the nomination process. I think a Mexican standoff is a much more apt and exquisite analogy, but I digress.
According to a recent New York Times analysis, many of these 21 Republicans want to limit the size and scope of the federal government, dismantle the IRS, get rid of the income tax, beef up border security to stop the caravan of “invaders” (naturally), and make it easier to eliminate federal offices and fire government workers.
Conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist famously quipped in 2001, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Well, these new MAGA Republicans have taken that old Republican dream to a literalist extreme. They’re fine blowing up the bathtub, the bathroom, and the house—and, just to be sure, they’ll even shoot everyone who’s left with an AR-15. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) Texas rationalized his obstructionism on Wednesday when he said, “It’s all about the ability—empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does.”
This is the inevitable result of the GOP’s Faustian bargain with MAGA extremists, racists, and conspiracy theorists whom they nurtured, supported, coddled, and embraced in order to gain short-term political power.
The people’s tax dollars are paying the six-figure salaries of GOP elected officials who want to abuse their power and privilege to annihilate the government and the democratic process, rather than using it to help their constituents. There’s no plan or solution to reduce income inequality, lower the price of prescription drugs, create jobs for the middle class, or help children achieve access to better education. Instead, their primary goal is to impede government, “own the libs,” and manufacture bogeymen to rile up their base for donations, votes, and media hits.
Unsurprisingly, most of these 21 Republican dissidents hail from three states, which are the hub of right-wing radical activism: Florida, Texas, and Arizona. Instead of proposing solutions to combat climate change or prevent COVID-related deaths, Florida Republicans led by Gov. Ron DeSantis have decided to woo the MAGA base by aggressively attacking vaccines, educators, gay people, and teachers for being “groomers,” as well as Disney for being “woke.”
Over in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott and Republicans are competing with their colleagues in Florida to advance the extremist MAGA agenda and galvanize national street cred with conservatives ahead of the 2024 election. Abbott is more comfortable with people having unlicensed guns than heat, energy, and water during national crises. Republicans in both states have no compunctions about wasting taxpayer dollars to kidnap and transport migrants to D.C. for theatrical outrage porn to satiate their base.
Meanwhile, up north in Arizona, Republicans raised massive funds from a fraudulent “audit” of the 2020 election, and now they’re attacking pronouns and remain ground zero for the conservative freakout over critical race theory (CRT) and drag queens. When they’re not trying to ban books, they’re busy palling around with white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes. The really ambitious ones, like Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, also allegedly helped right-wing activists like Ali Alexander plan the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally (though both have denied the accusation).
With that in mind, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the majority of the Republican holdouts have denied the 2020 election results—including Reps. Matt Gaetz and Anna P. Luna of Florida, Reps. Biggs and Gosar of Arizona, Rep. Keith Self of Texas, and Rep. Boebert of Colorado. Fourteen of the 15 incumbents voting against McCarthy also voted to overturn the 2020 Electoral College results. At least three of the 21 Republicans, including Reps. Gaetz, Perry, and Biggs, allegedly asked President Trump for pre-emptive pardons for their role in the coup attempt.
Today, on the second anniversary of the failed Jan. 6 insurrection incited by Trump and his conservative allies, it is worth noting that a majority of Republicans believe in the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. The Republican National Committee has referred to violent insurrectionists as “ordinary citizens” who were engaged in a “legitimate political discourse.” Nearly half of Republican voters now embrace some aspect of the white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory that has radicalized individuals to commit terrorism against Americans.
The extremism is the feature, not the bug.
Rep. McCarthy and GOP leaders voluntarily sacrificed their spine, dignity, and moral compass to these seditionists, racists, and clowns just to have a chance at power. Even though he knows Trumpism is caustic, dangerous, and violent, McCarthy nonetheless prostrates himself as a pathetic, gelatinous mound of red flesh in front of the star-spangled altar of MAGA made of brass and manufactured in China. The delicious irony is that no matter how much he concedes, begs, and grovels, it’ll never be enough. For the extremists, he isn’t a true believer. He’s an establishment cuck and fraud whose voluntary debasement will leave him as a cautionary tale in the annals of congressional history.
In 2021, McCarthy predicted he’d be the House Speaker and joked that it “will be hard not to hit” departing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once she hands him the gavel. Little did he know that the 21 Republican extremists he emboldened would be the ones holding the gavel instead, and using it to bang his pathetic political career to death.
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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva | Join Us in a Great Collective Effort Against Inequality
08 January 23
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In a landmark inauguration speech, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lays out his agenda for a more just Brazil and a new internationalism.
Today, in one of the happiest days of my life, the greeting I give you could not be any other, so simple and at the same time so full of meaning: Good afternoon, Brazilian people!
My gratitude to you who faced political violence before, during, and after the electoral campaign, who occupied the social networks and took to the streets under sun and rain, even if it was only to win a single precious vote. Who had the courage to wear our shirt, and, at the same time, wave the Brazilian flag when a violent and antidemocratic minority tried to censor our colors and appropriate the green and yellow that belongs to all Brazilian people. To you, who came from all corners of this country, from near or far away, by plane, by bus, by car or in the back of a truck, by motorcycle, by bicycle, and even on foot, in a true caravan of hope for this celebration of democracy.
But I also want to address those who opted for other candidates. I will govern for 215 million Brazilians and not only for those who voted for me. I will govern for all, looking to our bright common future and not through the rearview mirror of a past of division and intolerance. Nobody is interested in a country on a permanent war footing or a family living in disharmony. It is time to reconnect with friends and family, bonds broken by hate speech and the dissemination of so many lies. Enough of hate, fake news, guns, and bombs. Our people want peace to work, study, take care of their families, and be happy. The electoral dispute is over.
I repeat what I said in my speech after the victory on October 30 about the need to unite the country. There are not two Brazils. We are a single country, a single people, a great nation. We are all Brazilians, and we share the same virtue. We never give up. Even if they pluck all our flowers, one by one, petal by petal, we know that it is always time to replant, and that spring will come, and spring has already arrived. Today joy takes hold of Brazil in arms with hope.
My dear friends, I recently reread the speech of my first inauguration as president in 2003, and what I read made it even more evident how far Brazil has gone backward. On that first January 2003, here in this very place, my dear vice president José Alencar and I made the commitment to recover the dignity and self-esteem of the Brazilian people. And we did. Of investing to improve the living conditions of those who need it most, and we did. Of caring for health and education, and we did. But the main commitment we took on in 2003 was to fight inequality and extreme poverty, and to guarantee to every person in this country the right to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day, and we fulfilled this commitment, we put an end to hunger and misery, and we strongly reduced inequality.
Unfortunately, today, twenty years later, we are returning to a past that we thought was buried. Much of what we did was undone in an irresponsible and criminal way. Inequality and extreme poverty are back on the rise. Hunger is back, and not by force of fate, not by the work of nature nor by divine will, hunger. The return of hunger is a crime, the most serious of all crimes committed against the Brazilian people. Hunger is the daughter of inequality, which is the mother of the great evils that delay the development of Brazil.
Inequality belittles our continental-sized country by dividing it into unrecognizable parts. On one side a small portion of the population that has everything, on the other side a multitude that lacks everything and a middle class that has been growing poorer year by year due to the injustices of the government. Together we are strong, divided we will always be the country of the future that never arrives and that lives in permanent debt with its people. If we want to build our future today, if we want to live in a fully developed country for everyone, there can be no room for so much inequality. Brazil is great, but the real greatness of a country lies in the happiness of its people, and nobody is really happy in the midst of so much inequality.
My friends, when I say govern, I mean to take care. More than governing, I will take care of this country and the Brazilian people with great affection. In the last few years, Brazil has gone back to being one of the most unequal countries in the world. It has been a long time since we have seen such abandonment and discouragement in the streets. Mothers digging through the garbage in search of food for their children. Entire families sleeping outdoors, facing the cold, the rain, and the fear. Children selling candy or begging when they should be in school, living the full childhood they have a right to. Unemployed men and women workers, exhibiting at the traffic lights cardboard signs with the phrase that embarrasses us all: “Please help me.” Queues at the door of butcher shops in search of bones to alleviate hunger, and, at the same time, waiting lines to buy imported cars and private jets. Such a social abyss is an obstacle to the construction of a truly fair and democratic society, and a modern and prosperous economy.
That is why I and my vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, assume today, before you and all the Brazilian people, the commitment to fight day and night against all forms of inequality in our country. Inequality of income, gender and race inequality, inequality in the labor market, in political representation, in state careers, inequality in access to health, education, and other public services. Inequality between the child who goes to the best private school and the child who shines shoes in the bus station with no school and no future, between the child who is happy with the toy he just got as a present and the child who cries of hunger on Christmas night. Inequality between those who throw food away and those who only eat leftovers.
It is unacceptable that the richest 5 percent of people in this country have the same income share as the other 95 percent. That six Brazilian billionaires have a wealth equivalent to the assets of the hundred million poorest people in the country. That a worker earning a minimum monthly wage takes nineteen years to receive the equivalent of what a superrich person receives in a single month. And there is no point in rolling up the windows of a luxury car to avoid seeing our brothers and sisters who are crowded under the viaducts, lacking everything. The reality is there on every corner.
My friends, it is unacceptable that we continue to live with prejudice, discrimination, and racism. We are a people of many colors and all of us must have the same rights and opportunities. No one will be a second-class citizen, no one will have more or less support from the state, no one will be obliged to face more or less obstacles just because of the color of their skin. That is why we are recreating the Ministry of Racial Equality, to bury the tragic legacy of our slaveholding past. The Indigenous peoples need to have their lands demarcated and free of threats from illegal and predatory economic activities, they need to have their culture preserved, their dignity respected, and sustainability guaranteed. They are not obstacles to development. They are guardians of our rivers and forests and a fundamental part of our greatness as a nation. This is why we are creating the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples to combat five hundred years of inequality.
We cannot continue to live with the hateful oppression imposed on women, subjected daily to violence in the streets and inside their own homes. It is unacceptable that they continue to receive lower salaries than men, when in the exercise of the same function they need to conquer more and more space in the dissuasive instances of this country, in politics, in the economy, in all strategic areas. Women must be what they want to be, they must be where they want to be. That is why we are bringing back the Ministry of Women. It was to fight inequality and its sequels that we won the election. And this will be the great mark of our government, from this fundamental fight a transformed country will emerge, a great and prosperous country, strong and fair, a country of all by all and for all, a generous and solidary country that will leave no one behind.
My dear comrades, I reassume the commitment to take care of all Brazilians, especially those who need it most, to end hunger in this country once again, to take the poor out of the bone line and put them back in the union’s budget. We have an immense legacy still vivid in the memory of each and every Brazilian, beneficiary or not of the public policies that made a revolution in this country. But we are not interested in living in the past. Therefore, far from any nostalgia, our legacy will always be the mirror of the future that we will build for this country.
Under our governments, Brazil has reconciled record economic growth with the greatest social inclusion in history, and has become the sixth largest economy in the world, at the same time in which thirty-six million Brazilians have been lifted out of extreme poverty, and we have generated more than twenty million jobs with signed work cards and all rights guaranteed. We adjusted the minimum wage always above inflation. We broke records of investment in education, from kindergarten to university, to make Brazil also an exporter of intelligence and knowledge, and not only an exporter of commodities and raw materials. We more than doubled the number of students in higher education and opened the door to universities for the poor youth of this country. Young whites, blacks, and Indigenous people for whom a university degree was an unattainable dream became doctors.
We fought one of the great focuses of inequality, access to health, because the right to life cannot be held hostage to the amount of money one has in the bank. We created the Farmácia Popular [Popular Pharmacy], which provided medicines to those who needed them most, and more than that, which brought care to about sixty million Brazilians in the outskirts of the big cities and in the most remote parts of Brazil. We created Smiling Brazil to care for the oral health of all Brazilians. We have strengthened our Single Health System [SUS]. And I want to take the opportunity to make a special thanks to the SUS professionals for the great work during the pandemic, bravely facing a virus, a lethal virus, and an irresponsible and inhumane government.
In our governments we invested in family agriculture and in small and medium farmers, responsible for 70 percent of the food that reaches our tables, and we did this without neglecting agribusiness, which obtained investment in record harvests year after year. We took concrete measures to combat climate change and reduced the deforestation of the Amazon by more than 80 percent. Brazil has consolidated itself as a world reference in the fight against inequality and hunger, and has become internationally respected for its active and haughty foreign policy. We were able to accomplish all of this while taking care of the country’s finances with total responsibility; we were never irresponsible with public money. We have made fiscal surplus every year, eliminated the foreign debt, accumulated reserves of 370 billion dollars, and reduced the foreign debt to almost half of what it was when we took office. In our governments there has never been and never will be any unnecessary spending. We have always invested and will invest again in our most precious asset, which is the Brazilian people.
Unfortunately, much of what we built in thirteen years was destroyed in less than half of this time. First by the coup against President Dilma [Rousseff] in 2016, and then by the four years of a government of national destruction whose legacy history will never forgive: 700,000 Brazilians killed by COVID-19, 125 million suffering some degree of food insecurity from moderate to very severe, and 33 million going hungry. These are just a few numbers that are actually not just numbers, statistics, and indicators. They are people, men, women, and children who are victims of a misgovernment that was finally defeated by the people on the historic October 30, 2022. The technical groups of the transition cabinet coordinated by my vice president, Alckmin, who for two months delved into the entrails of the previous government, have brought to light the real dimension of the tragedy.
What the Brazilian people have suffered in the last few years has been the slow and progressive construction of a true genocide. I want to quote, as an example, a small excerpt from the one hundred pages of this true chaos report produced by the transition cabinet. The report says: Brazil has broken feminicide records. Racial equality policies have suffered severe setbacks. Youth policy was dismantled and Indigenous rights have never been so violated in the recent history of the country. The textbooks that will be used in the 2023 school year have not yet begun to be published. There is a shortage of medicine at the popular pharmacy, and no stock of vaccines to confront the new variants of COVID-19. There is a lack of resources for the purchase of school meals. Universities run the risk of not finishing the school year. There are no resources for civil defense and the prevention of accidents and disasters. And who is paying the bill for this blackout is, once again, the Brazilian people.
My friends, these last few years we have lived through, without a doubt, one of the worst periods of our history, an era of shadows, uncertainties, and a lot of suffering. But this nightmare came to an end through the sovereign vote in the most important election since the re-democratization of the country. An election that demonstrated the commitment of the Brazilian people to democracy and its institutions. This extraordinary victory for democracy forces us to look forward and forget our differences, which are much smaller than what unites us forever: the love for Brazil and the unshakeable faith in our people.
Now is the time to rekindle the flame of hope, solidarity, and love for our neighbor. Now is the time to take care of Brazil and the Brazilian people again, generate jobs, readjust the minimum wage above inflation, lower the price of food, create even more vacancies in universities, invest heavily in health, education, science, and culture. Resume the infrastructure works of Minha Casa, Minha Vida, abandoned by the neglect of the government that is now gone. It is time to bring in investments and reindustrialize Brazil, fight climate change again and put an end once and for all to the devastation of our biomes, especially our beloved Amazon. We must break away from international isolation and resume relations with all the countries of the world. This is no time for sterile resentments. Now is the time for Brazil to look forward and smile again. Let us turn this page and write together a new and decisive chapter in our history.
Our common challenge is to create a fair, inclusive, sustainable and creative, democratic and sovereign country for all Brazilians. I have made a point of saying throughout the campaign: Brazil is resilient. And I say it again with all conviction, even in the face of the picture of destruction revealed by the transition cabinet: Brazil is resilient. It depends on us, all of us. And we will rebuild this country.
In my four years in office, we will work every day for Brazil to overcome the backwardness of more than three hundred fifty years of slavery, to recover the time and opportunities lost in these last years, to regain its prominent place in the world, and for each and every Brazilian to have the right to dream again and the opportunities to realize what they dream of. We need all together to rebuild and transform our beloved country. But we will only really rebuild and transform this country if we fight with all our strength against everything that makes it so unequal. It is urgent and necessary to form a broad front against inequality that involves society as a whole: workers, entrepreneurs, artists, intellectuals, governors, mayors, deputies, senators, unions, social movements, class associations, public servants, liberal professionals, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens. After all, it is time to unite and rebuild our country.
That is why I make this call to all Brazilians who want a more just, solidary, and democratic Brazil. Join us in a great collective effort against inequality. I want to end by asking each and every one of you that the joy of today be the raw material of the fight of tomorrow and of all the days to come, that the hope of today ferments the bread that is to be shared among all, and that we are always ready to react in peace and order to any attacks from extremists who want to sabotage and destroy our democracy. In the fight for the good of Brazil we will use the weapons that our adversaries fear the most, the truth that has overcome the lie, the hope that has overcome fear, and the love that has defeated hatred. Long live Brazil and long live the Brazilian people!
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Prosecutor Jack Smith, right, and Cezary Michalczuk wait for the start of the trial against Salih Mustafa at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers court in The Hague on Sept. 15, 2021. (photo: Robin Van Lonkhuijsen/AP)
"You can tell it's moving quickly," said a former federal prosecutor who once served under Jack Smith, now special counsel, at the Justice Department.
Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department prosecutors are currently poring over new emails, letters and other records from battleground states.
“You can tell that it’s moving quickly,” Brian Kidd, a former federal prosecutor who served under Smith at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg.
Officials in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada confirmed to Bloomberg that they have complied with grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. The material turned over by Nevada and reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that Trump representatives baselessly accused the state’s local officials of allowing election “fraud and abuse” soon after Trump lost the vote to Joe Biden.
In a recorded phone call released last year, Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the general counsel in his office after the election to “find” enough votes to turn his loss into a win. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” Trump said on the call.
Subpoenas went to officials in a total of seven states that Biden won and where Trump or his allies pressured politicians and election officials in a bid to subvert the vote and create “fake” slates of pro-Trump electors.
Officials in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania either declined to comment about whether or not they complied with subpoenas or did not immediately respond, according to Bloomberg.
Smith’s team is also closely examining voluminous testimony transcripts recorded by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That testimony includes White House aides who testified that Trump knew he lost the election even as he was claiming fraud and a former official who linked Trump to the effort to seat the fake electors, Bloomberg noted.
The Jan. 6 committee last month unanimously voted to refer four criminal charges against Trump to the DOJ: obstructing an official proceeding, conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to make false statements, and inciting an insurrection against the United States.
Smith, who was appointed in November by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland just days after Trump announced he was again running for the presidency, is in charge of investigations into both Trump’s efforts to overturn the election he lost and into classified documents found secretly stashed at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, home.
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled in favor of the DOJ in a battle concerning those documents. Beryl Howell, chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., ordered that Trump’s attorneys had to provide the names of private investigators Trump hired to search his properties for any remaining records. The Justice Department presumably hopes to glean more details about how the documents were moved and stored at Trump properties from those investigators.
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N95 and KN95 masks offers more protection in comparison to other masks. (photo: Getty Images/Andrey Zhuravlev)
Variant XBB.1.5 is very contagious, meaning everyone is at risk even if you've already been infected. As the U.S. enters year 3 of the pandemic, here's an update on the state of COVID.
Essentially, everyone in the country is at risk for infection now, even if they're super careful, up to date on vaccines, or have caught it before, said Paula Cannon, a virologist at the University of Southern California.
"It's crazy infectious," said Cannon, who is recovering from her first case of COVID-19, caught when she was vacationing over the holidays in her native Britain.
"All the things that have protected you for the past couple of years, I don't think are going to protect you against this new crop of variants," she said.
The number of severe infections and deaths remains relatively low, despite the high level of infections, she said, thanks to vaccinations – and probably – previous infections. But the lack of universal masking means that even people like her, who do wear masks, are vulnerable.
The latest variant, called XBB.1.5, grew exponentially over the month of December, from about 1% of cases nationwide to 27% as of Jan. 7, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The variant is likely behind the vast majority of cases in New York and New England.
Its growth is probably due to XBB.1.5's characteristics – it appears to bind even more tightly to receptors in the human body than its predecessors – as well as human behavior, such as traveling and not masking.
It's a good idea to do what you can to avoid getting infected, said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
It's still early and there are a lot of unknowns about XBB.1.5, he said. Every infection makes someone vulnerable to a bad course of the disease and to the lingering, miserable symptoms of long COVID, Al-Aly's research shows.
"Reinfection buys you additional risk," he said.
What to know about XBB.1.5 symptoms and how long they last
COVID-19 symptoms typically last around five to seven days and can include fever, sore throat, muscle aches, exhaustion, nausea, cough and sinus congestion, among other problems.
Symptoms with XBB.1.5 are the same as with earlier variants and can range from almost nothing to shortness of breath and low oxygen levels that require emergency medical attention.
Early in the pandemic, COVID-19 often cost people their sense of taste and smell, at least temporarily, but that symptom seems less common, possibly because of vaccination or previous infection rather than a change in the virus, said Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital.
How long does COVID last? How long are you contagious?
It takes anywhere from two to 14 days for exposure to lead to symptoms and a positive test.
People with COVID-19 are contagious as long as they remain positive on a rapid test, typically for about 10 days, but often longer.
The CDC recommends people isolate for at least five days and wear an N95 or similarly protective mask for at least 10 days when around others. Day One is considered the first full day after symptoms start.
A PCR test, which is considered the gold standard for diagnosing COVID-19, can remain positive for months because it detects viral fragments as well as the whole, infectious virus. To confirm the end of the contagious period, experts instead recommend a negative rapid test after 10 days or two within 48 hours if sooner.
Can you get COVID more than once?
Yes. While a previous infection provides some protection, that fades over time and as the virus evolves into different variants.
Some people who had a mild case with a first infection get hit harder the second or third time, while others might suffer less.
"Even if you've had it before, that doesn't mean your next bout is going to be the same," Cannon said. There are lots of factors at play in determining the seriousness of an infection, she said, including prior immunity, the nature of the variant and how long it's been since your last infection or vaccination.
It's possible that her recent infection was much milder than her husband's, for instance, because she had caught a head cold a few days earlier, while her husband hadn't. A respiratory virus can put the immune system on high alert and might have provided some protection when she was exposed to COVID-19.
"It's part of the bigger dance between our bodies and our immune system," Cannon said.
How to avoid infection
The methods for avoiding infection haven't changed, though it can be hard to stick with them when no one else is: Get vaccinated, wear a mask and avoid crowded spaces.
First is getting vaccinated. This will protect against severe infection as well as reduce the risk of passing the virus to others, said Hotez, also dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
The newer boosters, which take aim at both the original virus and the BA.4/BA.5 variants common this summer, are more protective against XBB.1.5 than earlier boosters. People who are up to date on their COVID-19 shots probably don't shed as much virus for as long, so they're also less likely to pass it on, he added.
Past infection provides some protection against severe disease, but that protection is "highly unreliable," Hotez said.
Second is wearing a mask. Good quality, well-fitting masks, like an N95 or KN95 can reduce the risk of infection.
Cannon said people sometimes get annoyed at her mask-wearing "because it's like I'm reminding them that (COVID) is still a problem." But she doesn't want to accidentally pass COVID on to someone who might be more vulnerable to the virus.
Third is avoiding crowded indoor spaces. You're less likely to get infected in large indoor spaces with high ceilings and lots of ventilation than in cramped, airless ones.
What to do if you get sick
It's a good idea to have a plan ready in case you get sick, Cannon said. She suggests every plan include:
- How to isolate from others in your household
- The contact number for a health care provider who can prescribe an antiviral
- Equipment such as rapid coronavirus tests, extra masks, a thermometer and a pulse oximeter to make sure the patient's blood oxygen level doesn't drop below the low 90s
Every U.S. household is eligible for four free coronavirus tests from the government that can be ordered from this link: covid.gov/tests.
For someone over 60 or with medical conditions like obesity that raise the risk for serious disease, the first step after a positive test should be a call to the doctor to get the antiviral Paxlovid, she and others said. The government has pre-bought millions of doses, so they are available for free.
Some doctors are hesitant to provide the antiviral because people may need to stop taking common medications during the five-day treatment course, but it's essential for people at high risk for serious disease, Hotez said. "Any senior going on Paxlovid is not dying," he said.
"We can't stop people getting infected," Cannon added, "but we absolutely can stop people from being seriously ill. Gosh, why wouldn't you take it?"
Why it's better not to get infected
Every COVID-19 infection increases your risk for serious disease and for long COVID, which brings sometimes debilitating symptoms that can linger for a year or more.
Older adults are more vulnerable, Al-Aly said, "but it doesn't mean younger people are totally shielded." Long COVID, too, can strike people at any age from childhood through to the 101-year-old recently treated at his hospital, he said.
Vaccination reduces the risk of long COVID by 15% to 30%, according to a study he recently published. Another study he is working on shows Paxlovid reduces the risk by 26%.
Cannon's daughter works in a long COVID clinic and regularly sees patients who are in their 20s or 30s, "healthy people who didn't even have a particularly bad bout of COVID who now have a massively debilitating set of symptoms."
All six experts interviewed by USA TODAY this week dismissed the idea that there is somehow an upside to getting infected: Vaccination provides better protection against future infection without the risk.
"I'd be happy if I never got any virus again," Cannon said. "And I say this as a professional virologist."
Could we be nearing the end of COVID?
COVID-19 has been perhaps the most successful virus in all of human history, Cannon said, infecting billions of people across the planet.
While she worries about how it might continue to evolve, she hopes it's a good sign that for the last year, all the variants have been descendants of omicron.
Before that, the original virus, alpha, beta and delta had been "radically" different from each other.
"The virus is now in this committed lineage," Cannon said, which might mean it won't evolve away from the protection against serious disease that nearly everyone now has from vaccinations and previous infections.
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U.S. appeals court strikes down ban on bump stocks. A bump fire stock that attaches to a semi-automatic rifle to increase the firing rate is seen at Good Guys Gun Shop in Orem. (photo: Reuters)
In a 13-3 decision, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that despite "tremendous" public pressure to impose a ban, it was up to the U.S. Congress rather than the president to take action.
While the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) and Explosives had interpreted a law banning machineguns as extending to bump stocks, U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod said the law did not unambiguously prohibit them.
Elrod, writing for the majority, said the law also did not give "fair warning that possession of a non-mechanical bump stock is a crime."
One of the dissenting judges, Stephen Higginson, wrote that the majority employed reasoning "to legalize an instrument of mass murder."
Three other federal appeals courts have rejected challenges to the ban. While the Supreme Court in October declined to hear appeals from two of the earlier decisions, Friday's ruling raises the prospect the court could eventually decide the issue.
"The resulting circuit split should bring this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court's attention promptly and supply a suitable vehicle for deciding this issue once and for all," said Mark Chenoweth, the president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative group that litigated the case.
ATF, the arm of the Justice Department that adopted the rule, declined to comment.
A bump stock lets a gun's stock, which rests against the shoulder, slide backward and forward, letting users take advantage of the gun's recoil to fire rapidly.
Though gun restrictions are often championed by Democrats, former President Donald Trump's Republican administration imposed the ban on bump stocks through an ATF rule after a gunman used them in killing 58 people at an October 2017 country music concert in Las Vegas.
Democratic President Joe Biden's administration also supports the ban, which took effect in 2019.
In December 2021, a three-judge 5th Circuit panel had upheld the ban, ruling against Texas gun owner Michael Cargill, who opposed it.
Friday's decision reversed that ruling. Most of the judges in the majority were appointed by Republican presidents, while the dissenting judges were appointed by Democratic presidents.
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This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Rosewood massacre, which started after a White woman claimed she had been assaulted by a Black man. (photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Rosewood became the site of a horrific massacre 100 years ago, during the first week of January in 1923. This rural town was one of several Black communities in the US that suffered racial violence and destruction in the post World War I era. The acts of racial violence resulted in the loss of economic opportunity and inequality for generations of people of color.
There were about 200 people living Rosewood, a town in Levy County located about an hour southwest of Gainesville and about 9 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, at the time of the massacre. Mostly Black families lived in Rosewood and were landowners, farmers and worked at a nearby sawmill.
Violence broke out on January 1, 1923 when a White woman from the nearby town of Sumner claimed she was assaulted by a Black man, historians said.
A group of people in Sumner, which had a mostly White population, began searching for the alleged and unidentified man, turning into a violent mob that lasted for a week. At least eight people were killed, including six Black people and two White people. Homes, businesses and churches were burned and Black residents fled into the swamps, later settling in Gainesville and other cities.
Maxine D. Jones, a historian at Florida State University who has the lead researcher on a study about the massacre commissioned by the Florida legislature in 1993, said the massacre wiped out the entire community and was hardly discussed by survivors and historians for years.
“The story was buried for almost 70 years,” said Jones. “We retrieved this story, and it’s important to remember the past, we can’t forget about the past regardless of how ugly it is.”
State lawmakers have described the massacre as a “unique tragedy in Florida’s history” and recognized that no one was held accountable for it.
In 1994, then-Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles signed a bill to compensate survivors and their descendants. Florida House Bill 591 is considered a model for reparations for Black Americans.
The legislation said local and state officials were aware of the conflict in Rosewood “and had sufficient time and opportunity to act to prevent the tragedy, and nonetheless failed to act to prevent the tragedy; an entire town was destroyed and its residents killed or fled, never to return.”
Authorities “failed to reasonably investigate the matter, failed to bring the perpetrators to justice and failed to secure the area for the safe return of the displaced residents,” the bill reads.
The bill awarded $150,000 payments to survivors who could prove they owned property during the massacre and set up a scholarship fund for their descendants who attended state colleges.
At least 297 students have received the Rosewood scholarship since 1994, according to a 2020 report by The Washington Post.
“Money is often how we make it up to people, it’s one of the ways you try to make someone whole,” Martha Barnett, a retired Tallahassee-based attorney who was representing about 12 Rosewood massacre survivors when the 1994 bill was passed, previously told CNN. “Money for their property, money for the lost opportunity to live a good life. They lost the opportunity to have their first, second generation of kids benefit from the middle class life they had created.”
The massacre was dramatized in the 1997 film “Rosewood” by director John Singleton and only a historical marker remains in what was once the thriving town of Rosewood.
Direct descendants of the families who once lived in Rosewood led the fight for reparations in the 1990s and more recently, have been involved in the centennial events taking place this week. They continue working to reclaim their families’ legacies.
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Supporters wave flags and cheer as they listen to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speak during the ruling AKP party's rally on Nov. 27, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey. (photo: Burak Kara/Getty Images)
The name change was approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names following a request from the Turkish embassy, State Department spokesperson Ned Price confirmed on Thursday.
The State Department, which handles America's foreign policy, is the latest federal agency to adopt the spelling change.
Price said it will take some time for the department's website and communications to reflect the new spelling. The Board on Geographic Names also gave the department the option to continue to use "Turkey" and "Republic of Turkey" when appropriate. For instance, the previous spelling is allowed in cartographic products because it is more widely understood by the American public.
The name change also comes six months after the United Nations agreed to recognize Türkiye in June.
The current State Department pronunciation will remain unchanged, according to The Associated Press, which first reported the change.
The name change is not only symbolic but a rebranding effort
Turkish people have called their country Türkiye since 1923 when the Ottomon Empire fell and the Turkish Republic was formed.
In 2021, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed for the name by launching a global rebranding campaign. He asked the rest of the world to embrace his country's original name, not the anglicized version.
"Türkiye is the best representation and expression of the Turkish people's culture, civilization and values," he said at the time.
Erdogan's government hopes the rebranding efforts will enhance the country's reputation as an international destination and in turn, bolster its economy.
Some supporters say they wish to dissociate the country's name from the bird — which is largely known in the U.S. for being a popular dish on Thanksgiving as well as being a slang for something that does not work or is foolish.
But others are skeptical of the rebranding, arguing that it is simply a ploy to distract people from the country's long list of problems.
"Turkey is crumbling under possibly the biggest financial crisis since the Second World War. Our two neighbors are at war with each other. There is world food security crisis. And this is the moment we decide to change the country's name?" Turkish foreign policy analyst Yoruk Isik told NPR back in June.
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Firefighters spray down hot spots during the Mosquito Fire on Sept. 14, 2022 in Foresthill, California. (photo: Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
A new report shows the complex system used to pay wildfire costs is leaving states unable to pay firefighting bills and underfunding mitigation efforts as they await reimbursement from federal agencies.
“This is our current situation and unfortunately creates a hardship for vendors and cooperators in the process,” she says.
State legislators have approved millions of supplemental allocations this year through their contingency fund to cover the bills that racked up from fighting wildfires. That’s how the NDF is increasingly covering its bills as its upfront budget of $4.5 million rarely covers the division’s annual expenses, particularly for wildfires. The division has already relied on these contingency funds twice during the current fiscal year, which is only half over.
However, it’s not just a tight budget choking the cash flow. Nevada, like all states prone to burn, must wait months, even years, for federal reimbursement on wildfires that scorch a mix of state and federal land. In fact, federal agencies owe Nevada millions of dollars for firefighting costs that Nevada has paid up front in the last few years. One invoice for $343,000 dates back to a fire in the fall of 2020.
That one-two punch of meager annual budgets and slow reimbursements is increasingly burdening Western states’ budgets as they experience larger, more destructive wildfires.
“It can take several years for whatever the unpaid balance is to finalize,” says Colin Foard, manager for the Fiscal Federalism Initiative in the Pew Charitable Trusts. “In the meantime, that’s money the state has expended.”
When wildfires blow up, federal, state and local agencies, as well as private contractors, unite to try and avert disaster. Settling all their bills is a complicated slog, and while states typically draw on general funds to pay up front for wildfire costs, the lag time for reimbursement from the federal government is one reason why states are struggling to adequately budget for wildfires, according to a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“The federal government is using the states like a bank. That’s a problem,” says Laura McCarthy, New Mexico’s state forester. “They take up to 24 months to reimburse us.”
To be fair, the inverse can also happen—situations in which states owe the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management or other federal land management agencies money for fire suppression. But recent statistics show that nearly three-quarters of acreage that burns nationwide is on federal land. In Nevada, where 87 percent of the land is owned by the federal government, wildfires rarely start and stay on state land. A cost-sharing agreement is typically hatched while the smoke is still lingering at the site of the blaze, indicating how much of the cost each agency will be responsible for. After that, though, states are left holding the bag, waiting for repayment as expenses work their way through many layers of bureaucratic approval.
Ryan Shade, with Nevada’s Division of Forestry, says as climate change continues to increase the number of wildfires and their severity, states will have to scramble even more to bridge financial gaps as they await reimbursement.
“The financial burden will continue to increase and increase,” says Shade. “If the reimbursements are not happening in a timely manner, the scale of the impact that we’re currently feeling will just continue to increase every year.”
Bigger Fires, Small Budgets
Though most Western states avoided a catastrophic wildfire season this past spring and summer, that doesn’t reflect the long-term trend. The average annual acreage burned from 2017 to 2021 was 68 percent larger than the annual average from 1983 to 2016. It’s not surprising then that the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service have nearly doubled their combined spending on wildfire management in the last decade.
Fire doesn’t recognize boundaries, and often covers both state and federal jurisdictions, as well as county, municipal and private lands, leading to a complex process of billing and reimbursement between various levels of government to cover the costs associated with suppressing and recovering from the blaze.
Beyond reimbursing one another, governments also share some of the overall costs. For example, federal grants are available when wildfires are especially difficult to fight due to the threat they pose to communities, even when they aren’t on federal land.
Every state has a different system for how they manage wildfire costs, but unlike the federal government, states must balance their spending and revenue every budget cycle, making the reimbursement piece especially important.
“I have to pay back the contingency fund, or the money goes back into the general fund to the state. At the end of the year, almost every year, I’m giving money back,” says KC. It’s a “very complicated mathematical equation,” she says.
The Pew report, which looked at how Alaska, California, Florida, Nevada, Texas and Washington budget for wildfire, found that each state primarily uses general fund dollars to pay for wildfire costs upfront, and they rely on backward-looking estimates based on past suppression costs to decide how much funding to put into that budget. This approach, the report says, is putting a “strain” on state budgets.
Washington, for example, looks at a 10-year rolling average of fire suppression costs, removes the two highest and lowest cost years, and averages the remaining six years to determine suppression appropriations. Alaska bases its wildfire suppression appropriation on the least expensive year of the past 10 years and relies on supplemental funding for any additional costs.
“By relying on supplemental emergency funds it is obscuring the true cost (of wildfire),” says Foard, adding that not only is it hard to track all the supplemental funding handed over to fight fire, but because states tend to look at their spending in averages over years, even if states do include all the supplemental or emergency funds used during a fire season, the older, cheaper years drag the average down even as costs go up.
This backward-looking formula may have worked well when seasons were rather predictable, but that’s not the case any more, as most states are seeing an overall trend of increasingly large, destructive and costly fires. For instance, Washington experienced a particularly active fire season in 2019 and needed about $80 million in supplemental appropriations above what was budgeted based on the state’s historical average, which in recent years totaled around $24 million annually.
In Nevada, where the state operates on a biennial budget, KC says there have been years when she’s depleted her $4.5 million so quickly, she’s had to borrow from her second year to make it through the first year. “So there are times when I start my second year completely in the negative,” she says. Those budget shortfalls do not affect staffing, she says, as that money comes from a separate NDF budget dedicated to covering personnel.
Still, the financial puzzle can make it hard to quickly purchase new equipment and can delay payments to private contractors who may have supplied bulldozers, aircraft or additional personnel on a wildfire.
“Hardships caused by delayed payments for some small businesses and local government assets could force them to make the decision to no longer respond to fires in Nevada,” KC says. “This may lead to increased costs of wildfire for Nevada because the response may need to come from out of state.”
Money and Mitigation
When state budgets fall short in covering the costs of fighting fires, they can siphon money away from prevention and mitigation efforts for future fires, such as prescribed burns, mechanical thinning and homeowner education. However, the Pew report does see this tide turning.
California recently approved climate funding that appropriates $2.7 billion over four years for wildfire and forest resilience. In the last two years, Washington, Alaska and Nevada have also dedicated funding to wildfire mitigation efforts. And in 2018, the federal budget contained a provision known as the “wildfire funding fix,” which created a new pot of money for the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service to draw on when fire needs exceed annual suppression budgets, preventing the urge to cut funding for programs to prevent future fires to free up money for the costs of suppressing fires now.
The Pew report gives several recommendations to more efficiently cover the costs of dealing with the new era of wildfires. They include better tracking of state spending on wildfire, protecting mitigation funds from “fire borrowing” and creating state budgets that more accurately reflect rising risk.
In Nevada, KC’s working with her billing team to try to get partial payments from various federal agencies to help cover the $4 million in bills that are piling up. As president of the National Association of State Foresters, she often hears frustration about the lag time in reimbursements, but KC says it’s important to recognize that the system isn’t broken; it allows for a number of government and private agencies to attack a wildland fire swifty, with the assurance that eventually all expenses will get covered.
But as wildfire costs soar, she knows if budgets don’t start reflecting the true cost of fires, and reimbursements don’t speed up, the financial jigsaw that follows the blaze will get increasingly challenging to solve.
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